


The Very Last Crayon

by Queenspuppet



Category: Fantastic Four, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Colors and Emotions, F/M, Magical Realism, Romance, no science just magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 16:50:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14109786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queenspuppet/pseuds/Queenspuppet
Summary: One by one (by three by four) colors are disappearing from the world and taking emotions with them. Darcy Lewis notices first when her very favorite pink sweater turns bland and colorless, taking with it a hazy daydream of warm hands and a woodsy cabin. And she's the first to find a way to bring the colors back, filling them in with a scribble of old crayons from her childhood. But the crayons are running out fast and the colors faster.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> This was a great tumblr prompt for a fic I'll never write, from dresupi. And I really wanted to write it!! But it would never have been finished without a few very helpful eyes - bloomsoftly and zephrbabe, an excellent cheerleader - SerialObsessor (ibelieveinturtles), and the worlds best actual facts muse - freudensteinsmonster. Thank you so much to all of you!
> 
> There will be three parts and I'll have them all posted before the end of this week!

 

 

  1. Lavender Pink and Sweet Daydreams



 

Darcy stared at the fabric in her hands and waffled between biting her tongue and growling out her frustration. Jane appeared out of the bathroom in a bloom of steam, wrapped in a towel, and started digging into the laundry basket where Darcy stood.

 

“Jane,” Darcy said, and the woman hummed in response. “Janie, please tell me this isn’t my fuzzy lavender sweater.”

 

Jane glanced out of the corner of her eye and frowned. “That’s a gray sweater.”

 

Darcy’s face scrunched into a knot for a long moment as Jane plucked a handful of clothing out of the basket. Darcy snatched a pair of her own underwear out of Jane’s hands and tossed them back in, finding Jane some of her own. 

 

“I  _ know _ it’s gray. I can see that. But it used to be lavender,” Darcy said. “Pinky lavender. It was my favorite sweater, what happened?”

 

Jane stood up, arms folded around plaid and denim and one of Darcy’s bras. Oh honestly, she could figure that one out on her own as far as Darcy was concerned.

 

“It…faded?” Jane suggested.

 

“It wasn’t faded when it went into the wash,” Darcy said and she shook the sweater in Jane’s direction for good measure.

 

Jane sighed. “Darcy I am seventy-eight percent sure that I followed all your washing instructions and did not invent any new ones this time, okay? I’m sorry but…it’s still soft right? And gray is nice, it goes with everything.”

 

“Ugh,” Darcy said and then repeated herself for emphasis, but Jane was already on her way back to her room. She squeezed the sweater up to her face, nuzzling into the mohair. It wasn’t even a nice gray like a color that had been gently worn away. Just  _ blah _ gray.

 

She’d wanted to wear it today specifically. The Fantastic Four were coming to the Tower and even if it was the  _ worst _ idea ever, Darcy knew for a fact that she looked amazing in that sweater and she wanted Johnny Storm to think so too.

 

Although she didn’t really see the point of it now.  _ Blah _ gray wasn’t her color. She dropped the sweater back in the laundry basket and went to find a nice shirt.

 

_

 

“Lewis,” Johnny said in greeting, hopping up onto the scant few feet of empty space on her desk she reserved—secretly—just for him.

 

“Storm,” she said, smiling back at him from her chair. His eyes dropped to her mouth, as usual, then flickered down to her chest where she’d happily shared a little bit of cleavage just for him. He blinked rapidly and Darcy watched his throat bob as he looked back up to the rest of the room. Success!

 

He had his own chair at the center of the room where the others clustered around a conference table. Stark, or maybe Banner, always set one out for him. If it was Bruce it was probably to be polite but if it was Tony it may just as easily have been to emphasize the point that Johnny never sat in it. He came to sit with her, “at the kids table” in his own words. Not that he and Darcy weren’t equally vocal during the meetings. But someone needed to keep track of any  _ actual _ conclusions the scientists meeting might come to and that someone was Darcy. Johnny was just… “Keeping you company, Lewis.”

 

He was glancing at her mouth, at the collar of her shirt, at her wrists, her thighs. She leaned back against her desk, rested her elbows at the edge and gave him a better view of it all. It was pointless, anyway. Completely harmless. Johnny had made a move on every woman in the Tower  _ but _ her. But he liked looking at her and she liked the feel of his gaze on her, so what was the big deal?

 

“Who you all dressed up for, Lewis?” Johnny asked, his knee bumping warm at her shoulder.

 

“You,” she said, flashing him a grin and enjoying the smug bloom of warmth in her chest as tiny stripes of flush appeared over his cheeks. 

 

“We’ve got some strange global readings going on recently with the electromagnetic spectrum,” Tony announced, walking into the labs as if he’d been waiting on all of them. “Nothing…significant but best case scenario it’s a uniform glitch across the entire world’s tracking. Worst case scenario it’s…weird. And we should probably wonder about it before it gets any weirder.”

 

Darcy started to type, and Johnny’s hand landed on her desk behind her back with his thumb barely brushing at her spine. She tucked her chin to hide her smile and tried to pull up the daydream she’d drifted off to in bed the night before. 

 

A cabin, like the one her family had rented in the upper peninsula one summer as a kid, but with fewer mosquitoes and spiders. A fireplace, a deep couch with a nest of blankets, rain on the window. And a warm body behind hers as she tried to nap, hot fingers brushing over her cheek, tracing her waist, teeth nipping at the back of her neck.

 

But there was just an image of the cabin, moss laden and the door hanging nearly loose, like the old photograph she had saved from the summer. No heat, no rain, no blankets or teasing fingers.

 

So she let the daydream wander off and settled on enjoying the occasional twitch of Johnny’s thumb toward her skin, like a weak magnet that didn’t know its own purpose.

  
  


  1. Honeydew and The Rain On Your Face



 

Darcy left the Tower, trying to find a breath away from Jane and Tony and even Bruce’s bickering. Was the change in the visible spectrum interference from space? Radiation? Tony kept throwing the word ‘genius’ around in reference to himself and Darcy was pretty sure Jane was this close to stringing him up by all her awards. 

 

She’d seen the rain spitting gently onto the lab window and decided it was time to step out.

 

She shuffled to the side of the building, letting the milling new yorkers pass in front of her, and lifted her chin up to the sky. A drop of rain hit her cheek, and then another, and Darcy waited for that fresh, clean feeling to sprinkle across her skin, waited for the fog to clear from her brain. 

 

She just felt…wet. 

 

So she turned her face down and walked down the block to the little grocer’s shop with the best fruit, wishing she’d grabbed an umbrella.

 

_

 

“Darcy…this honeydew…isn’t ripe?” Jane said.

 

Darcy twisted away from the science wing’s communal sink where she was washing and cutting strawberries and turned to Jane’s assembled slices of melon. The fleshy insides were completely colorless, less than white or gray, as empty as Darcy’s soft sweater from earlier in the week. 

 

“It felt fine at the store,” Darcy said. Bertinelli’s always had the best produce. She bent and sniffed. “It smells fine.”

 

Jane lifted a slice and took a bite and a lick of juice trailed down her chin, and Darcy saw the way it seemed to dim Jane’s own skin, sapping light and color in its path. 

 

“Tastes good,” Jane mused, taking another bite. Her hand wiped away the juice on her chin and the muteness rubbed away with it. “But I’m having a thought. We should take this to the labs.”

 

  1. Burnt Umber, Bitter Regret, and a Bite of Chocolate



 

“As far as we’re able to trace, it’s only the visible spectrum that’s been affected, but we’ve lost at least eight very specific degrees of color at this point,” Bruce explained, gesturing up to a wheeled map of visible colors that took up the entire wall.

 

The slice that had once been the soft mauvey pink of Darcy’s sweater was circled, and the once nearly-white green shade of honeydew melon. They were placeholders now, duller than gray or white or black although those were the closest words for what remained.

 

“Here’s the latest,” Tony said, magnified the hologram to the wedge of deep reds and oranges and browns. “Closest approximation the computer can recognize is Burnt Umber.”

 

“How does something like this even manifest?” Reed Richards asked, spinning the hologram at his fingers.

 

There were thin gaps scattered throughout, a shade of green missing, a black without its depth, a yellow without any brightness.

 

Tony nodded to Darcy who stood, coffee cup in hand, and then dumped the contents onto the table. The last of the liquid dripping out of the cup was colorless, and pools of the coffee on the table were empty while thinner trickles still ran pale brown. The shift between the two made Darcy’s eyes hurt but the scientists all leaned in.

 

Johnny reached forward and pressed his finger into one of the blank puddles and the light in the liquid shifted at his touch, filling up with color and then fading again as he pulled away. He lifted his finger to his tongue and frowned.

 

“Still coffee,” Darcy said.

 

“I don’t understand what it means,” Johnny said.

 

“This doesn’t feel possible,” Sue whispered, running her own hand through the coffee spill on the table, brown blooming and vanishing.

 

_

 

“Lewis,” Johnny said, grin growing and blue eyes sharp as she opened the door to her Tower suite that night. “You shoulda invited me over for ice cream ages ago.”

 

“Oh!” Darcy said, mouth rounding as she stared back at him. She should have? Good of him to mention it  _ now _ when ice cream—and anything else that might have come with an offer like that—was mostly off the table. “Umm…hold on to that thought. But for later. Because… just come in,” she said, her heartbeats and breath fluttering in her chest. He blinked and she jumped, shaking off her stare and finally standing back to give him room.

 

Johnny’s ears were red as he entered her apartment and his hand reached up to tug and fuss at the short strands of his hair on the back of his neck.

 

“So…not an ice cream and chill invitation then?” he asked, wincing.

 

“Well no, but I love the idea,” Darcy said, shutting the door and resisting the urge to thunk her head against it. She turned and Johnny was standing in her entry hall, looking wary. “Honestly. Next time. I just…come on,” she grabbed his hand to drag him along with her through the open dining area and into the kitchen. 

 

She pressed a carton of dark chocolate gelato into his hands, spoon still sticking out of the quickly melting dessert.

 

“I…I’m not a big chocolate person,” Johnny said, brow furrowing.

 

“Wait, what? Really?” But he was such an indulgent person. Darcy waved her hands in front of her own face, trying to focus away from the idea of Johnny being  _ here _ with her and him thinking that they would…“That’s really not the point,” she said, grabbing the spoon herself and lifting it up to his lips, dark chocolate ice cream dripping.

 

Johnny opened his mouth and Darcy slid the spoon before he could speak, the words muffling in surprise and the corners of his lips quirking up as he stared down at her. Then they dropped, and his eyes stared over her shoulder. He pulled the spoon from his mouth.

 

“It doesn’t taste like anything,” he said, looking at the spoon and frowning.

 

“I know,” Darcy said. “But last night it tasted like the richest chocolate flavored ice cream you’ve ever met.”

 

“The color is still…” he stared into the carton.

 

“Still chocolate colored. Which, by the way, is not the same shade of brown as Burnt Umber, I checked.” Darcy pulled a bag of chocolate chips down the counter to them, and pulled Jane’s stash of organic chocolate out from the cupboard. “ _ None _ of this tastes like…anything anymore.”

 

“First colors, now flavors,” Johnny said, scratching at his hair again. “None of this makes any sense.”

 

“Are they…could they be connected?” Darcy asked.

 

“You mean like…the timing? Or the cause?” 

 

“I…I don’t know, I guess,” she said. “I only follow enough of the science to take notes.”

 

Johnny put the carton and bumped his knee against hers. They were standing that close and she would be a liar if she said she wasn’t deeply aware.

 

“Trust me,” he said. “That’s most of the work. And no one understands this anymore than you do. Have you told Jane?”

 

“I…” She’d just called him. Like a reflex. She bit her lip as if it could hide her blush and answered, “Not yet, she’s with Thor.”

 

He nodded and she wanted to say something. ‘This was an excuse to see you’ or ‘Sometimes I just think of something and wish I had a reason to tell you about it.’

 

“I’ll let the rest of the team know,” he said. “If Ben hasn’t figured it out already. He’s a chocolate fiend too.”

 

They both grinned and the smiles froze as a long pause filtered in. Johnny glanced around the kitchen, into her living room and then back to her, smile returning but a little harder this time.

 

“Well. I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

 

“Alright.” Why couldn’t she shake the awkwardness off? What was she supposed to say here?

 

“Alright,” he repeated, twisting in place and curving around her kitchen counter on his way out.

 

Say something, say something, say something. 

 

“Bye, Lewis,” he said, disappearing into her hallway.

 

“Bye, Storm,” she answered and the door opened and clicked shut behind him. “…Why don’t you stay for Netflix and chill, instead?” she asked absolutely no one, and this time she did let her head thunk hard against one of the cabinets.

 

He had wanted to be here, with her and she had…made him take a bite of tasteless ice cream and leave. And all she could feel was stupid and tired and annoyed she was missing her ice cream. 

  
  


  1. Greenish Blue Gray and Old Grief



 

The list was on the wall next to the calendar.

 

  1. Lavender Pink
  2. Hooker’s Green
  3. Outer Space
  4. Honeydew
  5. Papaya Whip
  6. Sky Magenta
  7. Glaucous
  8. Burnt Umber
  9. Dark Salmon



 

And next to each of them little scribbles about what they had meant. Earthy green, dark gray, creamy yellow orange, greenish blue gray and so on. Colors erased and leaving strange gaps in the world, easy to overlook. 

 

“Colors have funny names,” Johnny said, appearing at her side, warmth radiating and that soapy piney smell men always seemed to favor.

 

She’d expected nerves, after the embarrassing end to her inviting him to her apartment. There were none, just a mild flutter at his approach, the usual tingle of awareness over her skin in proximity to his. She tapped her hip against his side—sparks and tingles and heat—and he smiled at her.

 

“I was looking at the calendar, actually,” she said. “It’s the anniversary of my Mom’s death. I think I kind of forgot?”

 

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he said, eyes widening. An arm wrapped around her back and squeezed her to him—something deeper than sparks, and damnit  _ why _ was she so focused on Johnny when she should be feeling…anything about her mom.

 

“I’ve done that though,” he said, fingers brushing over her shoulder. “I mean I dunno if you wanna model your sensitivity to mine,” and he let out a small, nervous laugh. “But it happens.”

 

She supposed that was true. What was strange was the missing ache in her chest, the sudden welling of tears. The desire to be home, opening the front door and finding her mother reading a historical romance at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, four hours old. What was strange was that even though she was staring at the calendar, remembering the day, remembering her mother, it still felt like any other day. Last year she had taken work off for the fifth year in a row, and today she was just…fine. Or not fine. Not anything.

 

“Grief changes,” Johnny whispered, squeezing her shoulder. 

 

She hummed and nodded, glancing again at the list of colors.

 

“Glaucous…it doesn’t sound like a color,” she said.

 

“I looked that one up,” Johnny said, steering her back to the others. “Something about the powder on grapes.”

 

_

 

“Janie, have you seen my box of old stuff?” Darcy shouted, digging under her bed and finding only mismatched socks. 

 

“Which one?” Jane called from the kitchen table where she was running probabilities through some of Tony’s programming. 

 

“The one…I’m looking for,” Darcy answered weakly. There was a snort from the kitchen, which was about as much as she deserved, and then quiet. 

 

Fair enough. She hauled away a bag of old smashed shoes—that she never even thought about wearing any more—and tossed it to the other side of the closet to bury her collection of hats. Aha! A plastic highlighter yellow footlocker glowed from the far corner, speckled with band stickers and marker scribbles. She wrestled it out from where it was wedged between a box of old relationships and all her tax materials that her dad swore to her was better to keep in paper copies.

 

She meant to carry it to her bed but she stopped at the massive, electric-blue faux-fur rug at the heart of her room. She couldn’t remember what she had saved from her childhood and the curiosity was urgent. She smirked at a sticker for Tub Ring—one of the worst named bands on the planet—and cracked off the lid. There was Little Nugs, a stuffed animal loved well beyond the recognition of any kind of species and with only the faintest hint of where a nose might have been once. The box of crayons from the Christmas she swore to grow up to be a famous artist, lid ripped away and colors gleaming. Concert tickets and a diary from summer camp where she’d had her first kiss and her first major fight with a group of girls and her first experience of inappropriate interest from an older man just because she  _ looked mature _ . An underneath the prom corsage from the first boy she really loved sat a stack of family photos. 

 

She didn’t really need to look at them, she had them memorized by now. The cabin in the hills. The merry-go-round, the photograph of Mom at the bottom of the stairs the night of her surprise party, mouth stuffed with a banana and eyes wide with shock. Her high school graduation picture, no one smiling just Darcy clinging to the shoulders of her mom in the wheelchair. The remission party in Las Vegas, her mom dancing with street performers. 

 

They didn’t take anymore pictures after the cancer came back, it was too fast and not how she wanted to be remembered.

 

Darcy put the stack down, staring at her mom’s dark shape surrounded in bright city lights and waited for the ache in her heart. For the sadness to come crawling up her throat and into her eyes. 

 

Grief was gone and what was left wasn’t even the memory of it, only the knowledge that it  _ should _ have been there. 

 

She tore her eyes away and they landed on the box of crayons. She’d begged shamelessly for it, the biggest box they had. She  _ needed _ all the colors. She lifted them out of the foot locker and up to her nose, breathing in the waxy, sour smell of childhood. They were broken and smudged, papers torn down, and she felt more bittersweet looking at them then she did at pictures of her mother.

 

Her eyes stopped at one, tip blunt and rounded with little flecks of other colors chipped into the edges. She dug it out and looked at the label.  _ Thistle _ . It was…it was the exact color of her soft pinkish-purple sweater and it was just as bright as it had been in 1998.

 

  1. Scarlet and the Urge to Kiss



 

Darcy left her room the next morning and found Jane still sitting at the kitchen table with her computer and a cup of coffee. She couldn’t remember if she’d been wearing the same outfit the night before but it might be a good idea to enforce the ‘self-care’ regulations for the day either way.

 

“And today’s color is…” Jane said, rapping her knuckles on the counter.

 

Darcy raised her eyebrows. She needed coffee before she participated in a drumroll.

 

“Scarlet,” Jane said, and then shrugged. 

 

Darcy bit her lip and poured herself a cup of coffee before returning to her room. Her makeup was spread out over the top of her dresser. She took a long gulp of coffee, set the mug down, and opened her favorite lipstick tube.

 

It was dull and toneless. Darcy capped it with a little too much force and carried her coffee back to bed.

 

_

 

“I was thinking about what you said yesterday.”

 

Darcy looked up from the screen where she’d left her eyes all but bleeding at the graphs and charts of colors, studying hex codes and pigments in the visible spectrum. Finding the intersections of color where gaps had appeared. Would her eyes even get bloodshot now, with scarlet missing from the world? Or was that a different enough shade of red?

 

She turned her chair to Johnny who’d ignored Tony’s offer of a stand/sit workstation in favor of joining her at her lopsided desk that she’d insisted was moved in from London. (Just to see if Stark would do it, really. And maybe she was a little sentimental.)

 

“What I said?”

 

“About…about your mom. It being the anniversary and…it got me thinking about mine,” he said.

 

Their knees were brushing and it was warm and Darcy wanted to tangle their legs together, but it wasn’t the same sudden strike of attraction. No urge to crawl into his lap, drag him from the lab, take his mouth with her teeth after all the months of waiting and wishing. And Johnny was meeting her eyes steadily, the burn of his electric blue gaze something gentler than usual, less of its spark. And his eyes weren’t drifting down to her lips every other moment today. He wasn’t crowding her space, quirking his smile as he watched her talk. She mourned her red lipstick.

 

“The more I thought about her…the less I really felt,” he said quietly. He glanced at Sue out of the corner of his eye and then back at Darcy. 

 

“I looked at pictures of mine last night, trying to…force it or something,” she whispered but Johnny didn’t look like he judged her for indulging in a missing grief. 

 

His knee bumped hers, and it was such a friendly thing it put a sour taste in Darcy’s mouth. “Maybe it’s something to do with the planets? Pluto in retrograde or something,” he offered, with half a shrug.

 

“Maybe,” Darcy said, trying to seem grateful. He thought of her last night. That was  _ kind, _ at least.

 

_

 

The box of crayons was on her bedside table. 

 

Darcy sat on the bed, staring at the burst of colors, her hands tucked under her thighs. 

 

She thought of chocolate, and rain, and her mother, and Johnny’s eyes on her mouth. She thought of passing a painting outside of Pepper’s office that afternoon, and seeing the missing gaps of greens in the trees.

 

She shifted and her hand hovered over the box, fingertip landing on the brightest of the red crayons. She pressed her skin hard onto the rounded head of the crayon and then lifted it, seeing the bright but tiny flecks of color on her finger. She dug the crayon out of the box, nails scratching at paper and lifted it to her face, stroking the wax across her lips.

 

_ What are you doing, Lewis? _

 

She huffed and dropped her hand, staring at the crayon, rolling it between her fingers. Was it really scarlet? Or just red? Couldn’t she just as easily be having an off week rather than…than something strange and cosmic going on? Except strange and cosmic was now her line of work.

 

She stood and went to the mirror over her dresser. There was a faint smudge of red on her bottom lips, maybe only caused by the pressure of the crayon rather than the color. She uncapped her lipstick and it was smashed inside from clumsiness that morning.

 

She was being crazy. Whimsical. What did the visible spectrum of light have to do with feelings? Tastes? Memories?

 

Darcy took a small dish that held her earrings and emptied them out onto the surface of her dresser. She snapped a chunk of the crayon off and dropped into the dish and then wound the head of the lipstick up out of its tube and added that in as well, mashing them together with the plastic butt of the lipstick cap. The wax of the crayon was brittle and old but the lipstick was still smooth and velvety and for a moment it was just a cluster of red fragmented and chipped into a paste of colorless gray. And then it was scarlet streaks. And then Darcy’s fingers were sticky with scarlet lipstick. 

 

She lifted her fingers and painted color over her mouth and thought of Johnny. Her body burned, remembering the way their knees had touched, remembering that he had come to the apartment and wanted to stay. She scraped every last bit of the remaining red lipstick off her fingers and back into the dish, hoped it would last until morning. And then she went to lay down on her bed. She pressed her fingers between her legs over the seam of her leggings, pressed her lips together, and thought about kissing Johnny Storm.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

  1. Mustard and Sarcasm



 

Darcy practiced. 

 

Crayons weren’t the best at blending and it took her five tries to get the right shade of gray blue before she found herself bent over crying. Crying for forgetting her grief, having it stolen from her. Crying because she missed her mother and she hated this time of year and something far beyond a missing color a day was happening in the world. 

 

She scribbled Mauvelous on the cuff of her fuzzy sweater and the color seeped back in. The red lipstick kept. The coffee stains on the desk in the lab took back their dark brown and Darcy fell back onto the cushion of her chair with a sudden stab of regret. When purple vanished Darcy coated her nails in the dull paint and then colored over it. She wanted to go out into the world and color over every missing piece.

 

When Jane left a note on the counter reading, “Mustard,” one morning, Darcy went back into her bedroom and colored over a smiley face sticker and then pasted it onto her shirt.

 

Then she grabbed her list, and her box of crayons and headed up to the Lab. 

 

_

 

“That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard,” Reed said, holding Darcy’s list between his fingers like it was a child’s inscrutable cryptogram. “Honeydew and the refreshment of rain on your face? Is that even a thing?”

 

“Oh!” Jane said, eyes widening. She turned to Darcy, face twisting between disbelief and understanding. “Thor said there was something wrong with the rain.”

 

“How did you go about this exactly?” Tony asked, taking the list out of Reed’s hands. He snapped a picture of it with his phone and then it was projected up in the air for everyone to see.

 

And Darcy began to feel silly. She wondered what color went with light embarrassment. (Blush, of course.)

 

“I…paid attention,” Darcy said, voice wobbling, meeting the eyes around the table. Jane at least looked as if she believed her, almost.

 

“The chocolate,” Johnny said, eyes fixed on the hologram. “That’s when you noticed?”

 

“Well-” she started.

 

“Chocolate isn’t an emotion,” Reed said with a roll of his eye.

 

“Yes it is,” said half the room in unison. 

 

“That wasn’t the first thing,” Darcy said, fingers fisting into her sweater over her stomach, trying to gather courage or control or anything useful. “I was noticing, but not connecting at first. The first thing was my pink sweater and-”

 

“Romantic daydreams?” Tony asked.

 

“How are you supposed to know daydreams are gone when you aren’t daydreaming?” Reed asked.

 

“Because usually that’s what I’m doing while you all are talking,” Darcy snapped, arms crossing over her chest in a clumsy tangle as she tried to ignore the burn of her cheeks. 

 

Reed opened his mouth and Jane stood, bending across the table to point a finger directly into his face. 

 

“Before you say anything else I would like to make it clear that Darcy is free to use her right brain however she likes because her notes are  _ always _ impeccable.” Reed’s teeth snapped shut and Jane’s finger rounded over to Darcy. “I told you I didn’t mess up the laundry.”

 

Ben and Bruce snorted together, over to the side of the table with Sue where sanity still reigned.

 

“The refreshment of rain on your face,” Sue recited, staring up at the list.

 

“I noticed that one too,” Ben said, nodding and giving Darcy a crunching smile. Darcy reached out her fist for a bump and Johnny made a brief jerking movement until Ben tapped her fist lightly with his index finger. 

 

“Okay,” Tony said, eyes narrowed at the list, arms folded with his chin resting on his hand. “There is some…compelling evidence for this list. But the  _ crayons _ …”

 

“Your lipstick,” Johnny said and Darcy made the mistake of looking at him only to find him staring at her lips again.

 

“The urge to kiss,” Reed muttered with an annoyed huff.

 

“You kissed me for the first time in four days when Darcy walked into the room,” Sue said to him, face steady. “It may not make sense but it might be time to listen, alright?”

 

Reed blushed and the rest of the room very graciously did not rub it in.

 

“I mashed up a chunk of red crayon with my old lipstick. It took,” Darcy explained with a shrug of her shoulder. “As near as I can tell, if I try to color an unusual surface scarlet or purple that wasn’t scarlet or purple to begin with they just act like crayons. But I can do this,” she said and then reached into the box and pulled out a bright pale blue crayon, drawing a large quick lightning bolt on the surface of the table. “And that seems to work.”

 

“You could have asked for a piece of paper,” Tony said, and then added, “Friday scan the box, see what you can find in the recipe, and how many more boxes you can track down for us. What color is that?”

 

“Turquoise Blue, but if you don’t press too hard it works for Electric,” Darcy explained, passing Tony the crayon.

 

Tony bent and drew a small square on the surface of the table. He drew back with raised eyebrows. The square was dull, not blue or turquoise at all. Just a colorless square of wax scratched onto the white table.

 

“Oh,” Darcy said, staring at his failed attempt. “That’s not…good, is it?”

 

“I really hate whimsy,” Reed whispered.

 

_

 

“So, the test results on the crayons came back normal,” Darcy said over the phone. “They did not gain superpowers due to a radioactive spill or a spider bite or exposure to Thor’s Asgardian whammy or whatever Reed was thinking.”

 

Johnny snorted in her ear. “Then that means the super power is yours,” he said. 

 

“Ehnnnn,” Darcy whined. She had spent just enough time around super powers to know she didn’t really want one.

 

“What? I think it’s cool. We need to get you a cute name. Crayola Woman!”

 

“No way. Think of the licensing,” Darcy said. “Anyway, I went out and bought like four more boxes of crayons and none of them worked. Not even the same release ones Friday managed to dredge up. It’s me plus this particular box of crayons.”

 

“Still cool,” he said. 

 

Darcy smiled down at her bright green toenails, clashing against her still bright orange sheets. How many more days till they were blank too? “What are we going to do? I can’t run around the world coloring everything back in. Most of these colors are half gone anyway.”

 

“Well the good news is that  _ none _ of Reed’s proposals are going to work,” Johnny said. Darcy laughed and she felt like she could hear Johnny’s own smile in the pause. “Did they give you back the box?”

 

“Yeah, Tony seemed less convinced about the whole thing than he was this morning. As far as he’s concerned, none of this is real science.” She caught herself picking at her fingernails and made herself stop. The purple was already starting to smudge away and she needed as much of the determination the color gave her as she could get. 

 

“Maybe it’s not,” Johnny said. “So what? It’s happening. We’ll figure something out and in the meantime, you’ll take care of us like you always do.”

 

Darcy felt a heavy thudding pound in her heart, as if her chest was swollen, overfull with this fiery bright feeling. What color would take that away? Would she know how to replace it?

 

“What do you daydream about?” he asked, sudden and low.

 

Darcy thumped back into her pillows, holding the phone hard against her cheek. 

 

“You,” she said.

 

She hadn’t replaced Dark Salmon when she realized it was the queasy feeling in her stomach that had vanished earlier in the week and she was grateful for that now as she listened to Johnny take three slow breaths.

 

“I should have asked you that a long time ago,” he said. 

 

  1. Robin’s Egg Blue and Hope in Bad Circumstances



 

The colors stopped disappearing one by one. One day it was four gone, another day it was two. One day Darcy woke up without a hair color other than Pretty Dark. That was the day of the global announcement. The world had caught on.

 

“We’re not turning in Darcy or her crayons,” Johnny said straight away when the Avengers and the Fantastic Four met at the Baxter Building.

 

“Obviously,” Tony said with roll of his eyes.

 

“Don’t abuse the sarcasm or I’ll take your sticker away,” Darcy said, as she looked at the new list of missing colors.

 

Tony clasped a protective hand over the mustard yellow smiley face sticker Darcy had gifted him. “We’re going to let the ‘officials’ take point on this for now, since Lewis is doing what she can and if we let them know what that is, they would almost certainly find a way to ruin it,” he said. “How is that going, by the way?”

 

Darcy shrugged, finishing up adding her notes to the list and then searching through her crayons for the right crayon.

 

“Wisteria, a happy sigh,” Clint said, voice flat.

 

“I figure that one out, actually,” Jane said. “After Darcy fixed my bath time candle.”

 

“What chance of fixing this long-term do we really have if the only thing working is a box of crayons?” Steve asked, gesturing to Darcy, who was busy drawing a crude picture of a bird on a piece of blank card stock.

 

“Almost zero,” Bruce said. “At least not until we know more.”

 

Darcy smiled at her picture and lifted it up, turning it to face the heroes. “Give me that statistic again?”

 

She watched their faces lighten, their mouths quirk, their chests lift.

 

“Robin’s Egg Blue,” she said. “Hope.”

 

“Oh,” said Steve, eyes wide.

 

_

 

“This was a good idea,” Darcy whispered to Johnny as they left another patient room at the Children’s Hospital, a bright blue bird hand drawn picture with a little bubble that read “Get Well” pasted up on the wall facing the bed.

 

“I have them sometimes,” he said, grinning out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t forget to save some of that for yourself.”

 

The crayon was wearing down after a day of hard work. Darcy pulled a blank notecard out of her pocket and scribbled out YOU GIVE ME HOPE and then she passed the card to him.

 

“We can share it,” she said, and she grinned as his eyes flashed down to her lips.

  
  
  


  1. Dark Goldenrod and the Anxiety to Impress



 

Darcy colored red hearts on sidewalks (to prompt lovers to kiss) and little beige houses on stoops (for the relaxation of arriving home) and purple flowers in parks (more happy sighs). She went into grocery stores and colored the green back into granny smith apples to remind people that they were losing pieces of themselves and not just their sight. She drew unconventional rainbows on card stock and posted them on coffee shop billboards and in libraries. Her bedroom walls were covered in swatches of color that burned memories and feelings into her every morning, until her eyes learned to dance over the surfaces, picking and choosing her mood at will. 

 

The crayons were getting smaller.

 

And the list of colors was getting longer and as chunks of the spectrum disappeared every day it got harder to place the feelings they took with them. 

 

_

 

The phone beeped just before the knock on the door. Darcy read the text on her way to answer.

 

**Johnny: I figured one out.**

 

She opened the door to her apartment and there he was, his edges smoking in the tactical suit, and his hair color missing. Dark Goldenrod, she guessed, given the day’s additions to her list.

 

“Sorry,” he said, grinning. “I realized I probably shoulda given you a heads up I was coming. But I’m not supposed to text and flame at the same time so I had to wait until I landed.”

 

“Come in?” she offered, stepping aside. 

 

He followed her in, close against her toes, and took the door to shut it behind him. She was up against the wall and he was standing so close she had to press her back against the plaster for any semblance of normal boundaries. Unless…

 

“Is Jane here?” he asked and a spiky hot hand was curving around her hip.

 

“She’s still in the lab,” Darcy answered, and her feet shifted apart to give Johnny more room to maneuver closer.

 

“Perfect,” he said, eyes bright on her face as his head tilted down.

 

She wasn’t wearing the lipstick. That was all she could think. She wasn’t wearing the urge to kiss but unless she was an idiot that was where this was headed. She hoped she wasn’t an idiot and she tilted her head back.

 

The kiss landed softly, something feathery and tender uncoiling in her chest and she glad that was a feeling still left in the world. Johnny’s hands were lifting her onto her toes, fitting her against his front, the top of her head bumping against the wall as she arched against him. He was licking at her lips and she realized too late she was making small encouraging whimpers. His hips settled softly between her legs and his hands were warm on the backs of her thighs and the kiss was so  _ slow _ with Darcy chasing every drag of his mouth, every wet nip of his teeth.

 

“Anxiety,” Johnny whispered, pulling away.

 

Darcy’s eyes popped open, forehead knotting in confusion. “Wait, what?” she asked.

 

Johnny grinned. “That yellow-brown color. Anxiety about…being good enough for…just being good enough,” he said. He pressed his mouth to hers again and Darcy melted in his hands, the confusion vanishing into the kiss. He pulled away again to mumble against her lips, “The anxiety is gone.”

 

“Oh,” she said. Because if someone had tried to tell her that Johnny Storm suffered from a lack of confidence before this, she probably would have rolled her eyes and carried on assuming they were joking. 

 

But something  _ had  _ smoothed out in Johnny’s expression. Some of the eager, active energy in his eyes had slipped off into an expression so intent it turned Darcy’s insides molten.

 

“I know we should probably put some of it back,” Johnny said, grinning and palms squeezing gently where he was still holding her up. “But I wanna talk first. Without the nerves.”

 

He set her back on her toes and Darcy led him over to the couch.

 

  1. Ultramarine Blue and Lively Charm and Seduction



 

The world was unraveling every few hours. Darcy’s skin was fading away. It was easier to leave herself little pale notes about feeding Jane and Tony and Thor than it was to try and smudge the color back over her forearms only to have it rub and wash away again by the evening. She was always five days behind the missing colors and none of the scientist’s heads were in the work no matter how many blue lightning bolts she left on notebooks and tables. Thor, who remained untouched by the changes, was getting ready to take Jane off world with him. 

 

“This is no battle for a warrior,” he said to Darcy. “And Jane will find the answers when she is safe.”

 

He had offered to take Darcy too. Her crayons were wearing down to stubs but there was color left in them still. And the swatches of notecards and warnings burned bright on her walls. She had reasons to stay. Some of them easier to admit than others.

 

She hadn’t imagined it until it happened.

 

Johnny met her at the elevator of the Baxter Building with a placid smile and a dull, blueless gaze. 

 

“Oh, Johnny,” she said, but the crashing sink of her stomach was missing so that color must have gone too.

 

“It’s not so bad,” he said, shrugging. 

 

“It’s a massive relief, actually,” Reed said, passing behind Johnny. But he frowned as he spoke and he paused, waiting for the retaliation.

 

Johnny’s smile grew more placid and even and he shrugged again and Reed’s eyes met Darcy’s, tight and worried. 

 

“I had a plan for us tonight, but it’s kind of silly looking back on it,” Johnny said.

 

This time she felt it, a clench in her heart that was somewhere between affection and heartbreak. She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him before he could shrug again. She rose up on her tiptoes and his smile turned the smallest bit crooked as he bent to kiss her hello. It was a shallow, soft kiss and he drew back after a bare brush. 

 

“I think you should tell me about it anyway,” she said. “I like silly.”

 

“I was gonna make you Ramen noodles, cause it’s the only thing I know how to make,” Johnny said, fingers scratching at his muted hair. “But, like, the fancy kind? And I had a list of flowers to order but I think some of those colors went missing today…I wrote it all down. It wasn’t a good plan,” he said. And shrugged.

 

“Can I read it?” she asked.

 

It  _ was  _ a good plan. Homemade dinner and flowers and the color card Darcy had made for Sue so she could still taste the box of chocolate truffles he’d bought. At the bottom of the list was  _ cuddling in bed to movie (of her choice)  _ and  _ maybe 3 _ _ rd _ _ base? _

 

“I’ve never tried to plan a date before so it’s probably not very good,” he said. 

 

“You have a secret talent then,” she said, resisting the urge to pin him to the kitchen counter and kiss him right out of this tepid politeness. But Ben was there, eating chili out of a pan with the fridge door hanging open. And Johnny wasn’t really himself this way.

 

Still, his smile grew at the words. And when she slipped her arm around his waist he squeezed her closer and pressed his face into the top of her head. 

 

“Something’s missing isn’t it?” he whispered.

 

“Your game, kid,” Ben said on his way out of the kitchen.

 

Darcy stuck her tongue out at him as he left and looked up in time to see Johnny’s grimace.

 

“C’mon, I have an idea for what we should do,” she said, dragging Johnny back to the elevator. 

 

_

 

They walked to Central Park to see the beginning of the changing colors on the trees and, for once, the world felt vivid again. Sure, today’s particular shade of blue in the sky was missing but if you didn’t think about it too much you could imagine that it was just a gray day. The grass of the park was covered in blankets that Darcy suspected had been chosen just for the fact that they still had a hue to them. There were missing pieces, here and there—an absent leaf, a blank piece of clothing. But everyone at the park had made an overwhelming effort to turn up in Technicolor. 

 

Johnny’s hand squeezed hers and he found a tree for them to sit under, nestled together in the hold of burrowing roots. Darcy pulled a seashell she had re-colored—contentment in touches and the smell of vanilla—out of her bag and set it open faced on top of her knee. She rested her forehead against Johnny’s jaw and sighed. He was warm and still sweet and as far as she could tell he still had feelings for her. She would find the right color to match his eyes and find a way to bring him back to himself. For as long as the crayons lasted.

 

“You’re running out of color, aren’t you?” he asked, guessing at her thoughts.

 

“I’ve got a little bit of everything left,” she said, looking up into his face. “Maybe it can be enough?”

 

The leaves of the tree above them were just starting to shift to rust and tawny and a sharp, sour yellow. The reflection of the color gave her blank skin a warm glow, and Johnny’s hair a flicker of flame orange.

 

“I don’t think it will be,” he said and then he nuzzled his nose against hers. “But maybe it won’t be so bad.”

 

There must have been some color left with fight in it somewhere in the world because Darcy  _ hated _ this suggestion. 

 

  1. Rust and a Losing Battle



 

Darcy chewed at her fingernails, hunched over the conference table in the Lab. Bruce sat across from her, eyes fixed on the list of colors.

 

“I never thought I’d be rid of him,” he said.

 

They had spent the better part of the hour in silence since the alarms had gone off and the team had left. There were Doombots downtown—practically like clockwork—and Darcy would have been left in the Lab alone now that Thor and Jane were gone. But this morning Harlequin Green had left the color spectrum and with it, uncontrollable rage and the Hulk. 

 

“I…I can congratulate you,” Darcy said, tucking her hands underneath her legs to try and stop the nervous tick. 

 

Of course worry had to be one of the few remaining emotions left in the world on the day that her new boyfriend and her friends had to run into battle against emotionless robots. (Not that the rest of the world was doing so much better these days.)

 

“Is it something to congratulate?” she asked, uncertain about the protocol surrounding someone losing their inner rage beast.

 

“I…think so,” he said. “Whatever I thought I’d be feeling, or whatever I should be feeling…I think that’s gone now too.” (It was citrine, and happiness mixed with guilt.)

 

“Well, whatever color is responsible for relief at not being left to wait for bad news alone-” (Payne’s gray, approximately) “-That’s still here,” Darcy said with a half smile. 

 

Bruce returned the expression by an even smaller fraction before Friday spoke up.

 

“The Avengers and the Fantastic Four have returned and are on their way to medical after serious injuries.”

 

There was a stretch of quiet while Darcy waited on the arrival of the terror she had braced herself for. 

 

Oh. It hit her that the terror wasn’t coming, had left already, at the same time that Bruce said, “Come on, let’s go to medical.”

 

Then at least she had a urgent, growing anxious hammering in her heart, palms trembling as she pushed herself out of her chair, clutching the box of crayons between her hands and feet tripping on her way out into the hall. 

 

“Status report, Friday,” Darcy said. “Individuals.” She rushed towards the elevator, head spinning between the heavy and buried worry and wondering what else was missing.

 

“Mr. Stark has sustained another concussion,” Friday intoned. “Captain Rogers is currently healing from a burn on his left side. Agent Romanoff has a head wound, serious bleeding, cause currently unknown. Agent Barton-”

 

“Mr. Storm, Friday,” Bruce said, guiding Darcy into the elevator that had been waiting for them through most of Friday’s list. 

 

“Johnny Storm has suffered serious burns to his chest and-”

 

“Burns?!” Darcy shouted, and she found herself firmly planted in the world again, thoughts sharp and brilliant with surprise. 

 

“It appears that Mr. Storm was unable to reliably ignite during the altercation, and suffered several injuries as a result.” Friday had barely finished when the doors to medical finally opened and Darcy dashed out in the waiting area. 

 

The heroes were a mess. Sam was holding an ice pack to his shoulder and his wings lay crashed on the floor, one packed tidily away while the other was spread, twisted and jagged across the floor. Reed had little nicks and scrapes all over his face and arms. Ben Grimm seemed fine, at least, although all Darcy could see was his shoulders from where he was bent over, head in hands. 

 

“Damnit,” Bruce whispered.

 

Tony appeared from between sliding doors with a nurse dogging his steps and attempting to shine a small light into his eyes.

 

“Lewis,” he said, his eyes catching onto her.

 

“What happened? Where’s Johnny?”

 

Tony’s eyes were over dilated and shifting over her face unevenly and it was Bruce who finally grabbed the retinoscope from the nurse in one movement, and Tony’s chin in a firm hand with another.

 

“Pretty sure there’s a color missing for acting in self-defense,” Tony said, words squished by Bruce’s grip on his jaw. “Because we all choked and the bots did not. Also, probably a color for knowing when you’re losing because that took a lot longer than it should have.”

 

Darcy bit her lip. She would add them to the list, but what good could it do now when the colors were piling up faster than they could track. 

 

“Johnny?” she asked again.

 

Tony sighed as Bruce released him. “He’s alive. Still pretty. He’ll be alright in an hour or so once the docs are done with him.”

 

There was nothing for a long minute, no panic and no relief, just a white buzzing in her bloodstream. Slowly, the relief eased in, a surprisingly heavy feeling, reminding her that she had just been wired with nerves and electric with fear. 

 

“You should go in and sit with him,” Ben said from behind her. “Sue will be trying to run between him and Reed until you’re there.”

 

Darcy’s fingers gripped tighter at the box in her hands and she nodded as Tony and Bruce moved aside for her. The medical doors slid open and Tony told her where to find Johnny. She bumped into Sue on her way.

 

“Darcy!” Sue said, a faint confusion wrinkling on her forehead for a moment before smoothing away. “Oh! Darcy, good. Can you stay with Johnny while I-”

 

“Of course. That’s why I’m here,” Darcy said and Sue was gone before she could ask about Reed. Which was alright because she had somewhere else she really wanted to be. 

 

The doctors were leaving the room as Darcy reached it, and there was a chair already waiting at the bedside for her, a blanket draped over the back of it with little blood stains spattered across. Sue’s probably. Light from the window was landing over Johnny’s bandaged chest, his shadowed face looking wan and thin. 

 

Now that she was here, Darcy didn’t know what to do with herself. She sat in the chair, setting the crayons on a bedside table. Her fingers knotted in the cuffs of her hoody and her toes tapped and squeaked at the tiled floor. Johnny’s hand closest to her was wrapped in bandages, the pink abused skin swollen around the edges. She reached out and wrapped her fingers around his wrist until she felt his pulse beating softly in his veins. 

 

The color of the crayons shone from the box on the bedside table and Darcy’s fingers twitched against Johnny’s skin. Was there a color she could scribble across Johnny’s bandages that would serve as some kind of protection? A giant X in sage green drawn on like a shield. Except that sage green, as near as Darcy could tell, was the grumpy feeling of having too many cloudy gray days in a row. 

 

But maybe it was…

 

Her eyes caught on the stubby, brilliantly blue, cerulean crayon and paused. It had always been her favorite as a kid, so perfectly saturated and bright. And she had worn it down to a piece almost too small to hold, filling in construction paper to make scenes of the ocean, of a sky too rich to be real. It was also the exact shade of Johnny Storm’s eyes. As they had been, at least. 

 

An idea occurred to her. And it was a terrible one. One that might very well require the doctors coming back in to attend to Johnny again. But…

 

He was a superhero, he’d probably be fine. 

 

Darcy tipped the crayons out onto the table, pushing the broken bits of color aside until she pinched the bright blue between color sapped fingers, the purple on her nails nearly smudged and chewed away. (But not entirely, enough left to go through with her plan.) She bounced out of the chair and up onto the bed at Johnny’s side, freezing as a quiet groan rumbled in his chest and his forehead knotted.

 

“Sorry,” she whispered, waiting to for him to stir again. She brushed her fingers over a bruised cheek and the furrow relaxed at her touch, tight lips easing. She held her breath for a moment but when he stayed sleeping she added, “Sorry about this too.”

 

Her hand hovered his eye for a long moment before settling on his skin, index finger over his eyelid. Johnny didn’t even twitch. Darcy peeled his eye open gently with her left hand and chewed at her lip, the taste of her red lipstick waxy and dull on her tongue. Johnny’s eye was looking out blankly, color empty from his iris, nothing reacting as she brought the blue crayon closer. It stuck for a moment, touching at the unguarded iris, and Darcy pulled her hand away quickly, afraid that she had probably torn something important and Johnny would be  _ blind _ now as well as devoid of his usual personality. But there was a smudge of blue left behind, deeper than surface, layering in all the fabric of color of an eye. So she repeated herself, smudging softly over a watery and unconscious eye, careful to stay in the lines just as if she were coloring a picture. And then she did the other eye, Johnny’s breath deepening as she finished, his forehead wrinkling again.

 

He huffed and licked at his lips as she drew away. His eyes squeezed shut tight for a long moment and her earlier fear of doing more harm than good returned. And then he blinked and his head tilted to the side and he saw her.

 

The side of his mouth quirked up in a smile.

 

“Kiss it better?” he suggested with a raspy voice and a wiggle of his eyebrows.

 

Darcy laughed and there was a wet hiccup of relief in the sound. She bent, her hair falling around their faces, and kissed him hard on the mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you enjoyed! last section in the next couple days. Leave me some sugar!


	3. Part Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unbeta'd, apologies!

 

  1. Lilac and Nostalgic for an Old Romance



 

Darcy bought Johnny flowers and colored the petals back to life and brought them to his hospital room as he was getting released from medical. Whatever defensive instincts had motivated Johnny’s flame into protecting him for so many years seemed to be on the fritz, or on vacation with another color. 

 

“Retired at twenty-nine,” Johnny mused. “Gonna have to find some hobbies.”

 

Thankfully, within a few days so too went motivation for villainy and New York was a new kind of peaceful. A city without its hot blooded heartbeat, without so many of its crowds. But people went to work each day and they wore whatever colors they could find left. Some kind of defensive rebellion was left.

 

Darcy colored Johnny’s eyes back to blue everyday. And then her own, when that blue went too one afternoon.

 

He bought her a pot of washed out marigolds and she colored those and found herself with the sudden urge to go to the museum. (She made a note of the connection.)

 

The Met was deserted. Barely a tourist to be found. And hardly any colors left on the canvases.

 

Darcy was wincing at a Seurat, searching out singular dots here and there that still held their hue among all the fallen spots of paint. Earlier she had seen a Picasso blue period without any blue at all. All the Virgin Marys were missing their pure and holy shrouds, and their golden glows. 

 

“What color do you think it was that would really have made this experience feel extra depressing?” Darcy asked, turning away from the painting and searching the gallery for Johnny. The notes of her voice rang in the open space.

 

“Darcy,” he called through a doorway at the other end of the hollow room. “Come see this.”

 

Her steps over the paneled floor echoed like a drum without the buffer of bodies to quiet the sound. Johnny was around the corner gazing up at a large canvas gone gray without its color. Two figures, flat like dolls, spread out over the top of a flowering bush with the moon in the background, with all the lines and edges of paint soft. And on the museum wall around the painting, like a second frame, was drawn a pale purple trace of swirls and flourishes and dripping lilac blossoms. 

 

For a moment, Darcy only considered the poor janitor who would have to wash that away.

 

And then she thought of Ian, in England, hapless and sweet and seemingly mesmerized by her brashness, and her heart ached warmly for him. Gentle and fond and fleeting.

 

“Is it yours?” Johnny asked, still staring. She could hear it in his voice too, the remembering.

 

“No,” she said, lost somewhere in London with her fingers twined with a bonier pair of hands, sipping black tea with cream. She blinked and then walked up to the wall. The color was uneven and sticky on the wall. 

 

“It’s crayon,” Johnny said, and he was right behind her, taking her hand in his and nudging away the memory of Ian’s.

 

“It’s not mine,” Darcy said, eyes growing wide. “It’s…Oh.  _ Oh _ ! I think I get it now!”

 

And Reed would  _ hate  _ it. It was all... whimsical.

 

  1. School Bus Yellow and the Distance of Childhood



 

Johnny held her hand as they walked down the row of old storage units. They had ridden his motorcycle out to Long Island in the morning and Johnny had insisted they get breakfast at one of his high school haunts, a diner where the grill chef had looked at him, and then at a photograph by the front door of a young Johnny sprawled out on the same tile floor they walked out, covered in ketchup like a murder scene. He had given them both a long stare as they took seats at the counter and then served them the best crispy potatoes Darcy had  _ ever _ had.

 

As it turned out, superheroes didn’t really keep track of their old childhood art supplies. And they definitely didn’t carry it across state lines like she had. Tony claimed he hadn’t even been  _ given _ crayons although Darcy suspected it was more likely he hadn’t been interested in them long enough to remember. Still, they had gotten the word out to the public. Color was slowly being splashed across walls and signs, thousands of little stick figures and abstract houses and bright bird shapes taped to walls around the world. Kids and surly teens and sentimental artists were coming to rescue and Crayola (and the off brands) had an impressive new marketing campaign, even if it wasn’t the  _ new  _ boxes doing the work.

 

_ Find the Color in the World _ , was the slogan.

 

More specifically, find your old crayons and replace the color in the world.

 

Darcy was down to little fragments now. A smear of scarlet, a chip of cerulean, a kernel of mauvelous. It’d only be another day before those were used up and she and Johnny and the Avengers were left to somewhat colorless devices.

 

They stopped in front of the unit door marked 2308 and Johnny’s hand squeezed hers.

 

“Why’d you keep the storage out here?” she asked, as he stared at the key in his hand. “Why not the Baxter building?”

 

“I was afraid I’d spend too much time just…remembering. Missing her,” he said. “We left it kinda a mess in there when we moved out of the old house, this could take awhile.”

 

“We’ve got awhile,” Darcy said shrugging. He held still for a moment so she lifted up on her toes and kissed at his jaw line.

 

One of his arms wrapped around her waist and he squeezed her closer. “What if it’s not in there?” he asked.

 

Darcy chewed at her lip and then shrugged, Johnny’s hold on her shifting with the gesture. “We can lock ourselves in my room where the colors are plastered everywhere, feeling everything at once. Or…or we can…function.”

 

Johnny grimaced at the word and Darcy agreed. She did what she could for the residents of the Tower, leaving splashes of color out to spark something for the people passing in the halls. But Tony Stark was on a regular eating and sleeping schedule ninety percent of the time, and he was designing functional, useful things without a chance of them exploding. It could almost be mistaken for an improvement and Darcy could see the struggle in Pepper’s eyes sometimes, relief mixed with the understanding that this was something  _ wrong _ . (Olive green.)

 

Johnny sighed, squeezed around her waist once more and then released her, stepping up to the padlock. “Sounds boring,” he said. 

 

The metal door slid up with a noisy rattle and Darcy had to rush forward to help Johnny brace against a precarious cascade of cardboard boxes. A little boy’s light up sneaker tipped out of the top box and hit the concrete beside them.

 

“Did I mention it was a mess?” Johnny asked, cheeks tinting darker with a sheepish smile. 

 

_

 

It was clear the boxes had been packed by Sue and Johnny themselves, without any reliable sense of order. Clothing, toys and books were thrown haphazardly together as if they’d been snatched up from the floor in a rush and dumped into a hastily taped cardboard box. They had to unstack the boxes to examine the contents, spreading them out in the lane around the storage unit and more than once having to hustle them back inside to allow a car to pass behind them. 

 

Johnny was huffing and scrubbing a hand over his hair every time he finished examining one stack. (Absent minded frustration, Persian Orange.) But Darcy was functioning on something beyond patience. A kind of curious voyeurism. Johnny offered up stories, quiet and short with a cast of characters she could only guess at and context missing, but the pieces together made a kind of mosaic of his childhood. And for every few boxes they excavated and then rearranged into a tidier sense of organization, Darcy found a treasure. 

 

A t-shirt in a highlighter green that still made her eyes burn with its obnoxious brightness. An airy blue cover on a children’s book. A bright yellow school bus on little black wheels that struck her hard with the feeling that those miserable, loud hours of childhood trapped on hot rubber seats, were now so far away they felt like someone else’s memories. 

 

“Did I  _ ever _ color?” 

 

Darcy looked over to where Johnny was muttering to himself and digging through what looked like Sue’s old clothes and more of his toy cars. She put the school bus on her small stack of objects that glowed in in the dim garage. She was a magpie for color now, cataloging and collecting, building altars out of every glimmer she could find in the world. But better to take them back to the Baxter Building than leave them hidden in a cardboard box in Long Island, she figured. 

 

“Darcy,” Johnny sighed, dropping another box to the floor with a little too much force. “It’s not here-”

 

“Hand me that hat,” Darcy said, pointing to the little stocking cap with the violently pink pompom winking at her. “And quit making a stink. Haven’t you ever seen a movie? It’s always in the last box you check.”

 

Johnny stared at her for a long moment then snatched the hat out of the box at his feet and navigated his way to her through the maze of with enviable ease.  _ Stupid long legs and skinny hips _ , she thought, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. He dropped the hat next to her pile and then grabbed her hips and lifted her to sit on a stack of boxes. Darcy squeaked as the one below her shifted and sagged, grabbing onto Johnny’s shoulders as he shuffled closer to her. 

 

“You aren’t wearing your lipstick but I still wanna kiss you,” Johnny said, crowding her space. 

 

Darcy folded her legs around his hips and stared up at that secret weapon smile of his, the smoldering coals instead of the bright spark of flickering flames. The teasing sting of blue in his eyes spread over her cheeks as he held her there, hips warm in his hold.

 

“Must be some other emotion,” she said, trying to stretch herself up to catch his lips. 

 

“Feels like a big one,” he said, low and almost absent as he ducked down and pulled at her parted lips with his own. 

 

Her fingers dug into his shoulders as the kiss deepened. She wanted to run his words through her head again, break them down and analyze them. But his teeth were nipping at her lips before his tongue swept inside her mouth, brushing against hers and then tracing behind her teeth. Darcy squirmed in his hold as her questions were chased away with the bitter and sweet coffee flavor of his mouth and Johnny’s hands sliding up under shirt.

 

All at once the box beneath her gave up, one side collapsing and Darcy falling away from the kiss clumsily, one hand clutching at Johnny’s shirt while the other tried to brace herself.

 

Johnny released her to step back, belly laughing as she tried to scramble out of the box. He tripped against a stack behind him and sent them domino-ing backwards and out of the open doorway. 

 

“Oof, shit,” Johnny said, nearly falling backwards himself..

 

“You deserve that,” Darcy managed between her own laughs. Her hand finally found a grip in the box of toys beneath her and she stood up. 

 

“Aw man…Now I don’t remember which boxes we’ve already checked,” Johnny said, looking over the sea of tipped and toppled cardboard.

 

Darcy stared down into the crumpled box she had sat on, where her hands was braced over a smaller box, the printed colors vanished but the words clear. 

 

“Darce, can you gimme a hand?” Johnny asked from behind her. 

 

Darcy blinked and turned back to him, crayon box in hand. “We found it.”

 

Johnny scrambled off the floor, kids clothes spilling out as he kicked a box aside and reached for the crayons in her hand. It was a smaller set than hers, lid still in place. But when he tipped it back out of the way the colors gleamed with sharp tips.

 

“Holy shit,” Johnny said.

 

Darcy grinned and fingered at the collar of his t-shirt where there was a little rip from her attempt to save herself. “Now we just have to find our way out of here,” she said, glancing at the mess around them. 

 

Johnny’s free hand clutched low on Darcy’s back and then he had her wrapped up tight against him, lips missing each other and noses bumping, box of crayons digging into her shoulder blades as they kissed.

  
  


  1. An Emotion with an Unknown Color



 

Johnny followed her into her apartment with his arm around her waist and his mouth on her neck. Darcy tried to leave her new assortment of colorful items with the others that greeted her from the side table—a bird ornament with feathers still painted a glossy deep purple, a fake apple where the pinkish red still glowed, a snowflake ornament with a silvery gray sheen—but she heard the bag slide off the wood and clatter down to the floor. 

 

It didn’t matter. 

 

Johnny had spun her in place and lifted her up against him, her legs wrapping around narrow hips. His hands were tight on her thighs, the corner of the crayon box digging into the back of her leg where he trapped it between them. But the kiss was soft and deep, messy and sweet and there was a note of pleading cracking at the back of Johnny’s throat that she tried to answer with her fingers in his hair and her lips against his.

 

“Bedroom’s that way,” she mumbled against him, teeth nudging and then nipping. She pointed in a direction that was probably closer to the kitchen. Which would do fine, she decided as Johnny’s gentle bites skimmed her throat.

 

He set her down on shaky legs and let her pull him through the hall and the open living area over to her bedroom. He stopped short in the doorway, eyes taking in the squares of color that ran in columns down her wall around her dresser, the top of which was littered with crayon fragments and trinkets of color including a few that had lost their glow in the past day or two. 

 

“You wake up to that?” Johnny asked, his face tangling over every little fleeting feeling as he skimmed it, body leaning away.

 

“It can be overwhelming,” Darcy said, and instead of staring with him she looked down at their fingers which were toying together, tangling and untangling. Her heart was thumping and squeezing and there were little butterfly thrills sparking in her stomach and hips and her lips felt swollen and her skin felt needy and her eyes burned as if she were about to start crying. This was a collection of colors, of emotions, or something bigger than any little individual feeling. 

 

Johnny was close again, nose nuzzling into the soft hairs behind her ear, lips pressing chaste kisses on the skin there. Chaste maybe, but still enough to make her burn. Her fingers dug into his arms and he wrapped them around her back.

 

“Will you color in my eyes again?” he asked. She leaned back and saw they were almost faded again, just little sparks caught in a dull net. He added, with a small smile, “I want to seduce you.” 

 

“You’re doing fine as is,” Darcy said, without really meaning to, and escaped his grin by going to her dresser.

 

The little pot of red lipstick she had remade for herself was sitting with the lid tilted off. She smeared the remaining traces of it over her lips and then pinched up the chips of bright blue between her fingers. Johnny was waiting for her on the bed, his shoes kicked off on the floor and his back against the wall. His eyes widened and then darkened as he watched her approach. 

 

“There’s a mess of colors behind you and all I wanna do is stare at your mouth,” Johnny said with a surprisingly gentle tone given he was eyeing her like a predator waiting to pounce. But he stayed on the bed, only reaching out to stroke his fingers up the back legs of her jeans as she shuffled over his lap.

 

“That’s the idea,” she admitted. “Lean closer.”

 

He did, popping his eyes wide open as she set her fingers over his cheek. “I didn’t need much motivation,” he said.

 

He held still as she held his eyelid back, tapping color gently over his iris. His mouth grimaced but he winked with the eye she had finished and she rewarded him with a kiss that left a vivid red smear over his mouth.

 

“Other eye first,” he said, voice a little hoarse as she stared at the red print on his mouth. 

 

She hummed a weak agreement and set to work. The blue was barely a waxy smudge over her fingertip when she finished and she scraped it off on her bedside table next to where Johnny had set his box of crayons. His fingertips were skirting up under her shirt, little points of heat crawling up her ribs. 

 

His gaze was glowing when she turned back to him, smile wicked. So she grabbed at the hem of his t-shirt and wrestled it up his chest as he laughed until he helped her, sitting up and tugging it over his head. She bent and kissed a bright red spot at the center of his chest, listening to his breath catch as her fingernails scratched gently down over his nipples and against his ribs.

 

The shirt landed somewhere on her floor and then Darcy landed on her back with an ‘oof’ and a moan as Johnny flipped them on the bed, his hips settling heavily between hers in a way that made her arch beneath him. His face hovered over hers, pulling away as she tried to stretch up to kiss him.

 

“Hey Darce?”

 

“Hmm?” she asked, compromising by sucking at his neck where his pulse beat heavily against her tongue.

 

“What’s the color for love?”

 

Darcy’s head landed against the mattress with a soft thump and Johnny’s cheeks were dark, teeth chewing at his own red lip as he stared down at her. She slid her palm down his back and around to rest over the red kiss she’d left on his chest.

 

“I don’t know if there is just one,” she said, wondering if she was back in color again because she felt like she was  _ glowing _ . But no, they were still dim, skin to skin. So she said, “Maybe it’s too big for one.”

 

Johnny smiled faintly as his head dipped down to hers. “It must be,” he whispered, settling one soft kiss on her lips before sliding down the bed, warm hands pushing her shirt up out of the way for his tongue to trace over her skin as she twisted underneath him. 

  
  


  1. Squash Yellow and Wary Excitement



 

Johnny opened his eyes in the morning. There was light shining in through the gap in the curtains, a bright wall stretching across the room. Warm fingers spread at the base of his back and he rolled over to see Darcy, dark hair tangled over her face with a smudge of hot red left at the corner of her mouth, startlingly bright in all the shadow and the sapped out light. He looked down at his chest and saw a smear of a kiss printed in red over his heart. It made his blood warm in his chest and he turned back to the bedside table. The box of his old childhood crayons sat open. Barely used, the colors almost glowed under the stream of sunlight.  _ Eyes first _ read the paper note at the front of box, the letters in an electric, vivid blue.

 

He thought about staying in bed with Darcy, soft and warm at his side. Thought about making coffee and watching the city out of her living room window. He thought about the night before, the way red shined on her mouth as she bent to kiss him, her bare legs over his naked hips. There was something flat and dry to the picture of it now, but he could  _ remember _ the arousal, distant and removed. It had felt good…it had felt like  _ fire _ . And under all of that…something warmer, deeper.

 

He sat up and pulled the blue crayon out of the box.

 

He padded to the bathroom and flipped on the light. The first time Darcy had done this he’d been unconscious, and the rest…well she had a steadier hand than him because he couldn’t stop himself from flinching as he raised the gently worn tip of the crayon up to his eye. 

 

_ It’s like putting in a contact, _ she had said.  _ Or like putting on eyeliner _ .

 

He hadn’t done either of those things but he held his eye open with one hand as he pressed a soft circle around his iris with the brilliant blue. It was sticky, and it stung for a moment but when he blinked the world sharpened. The second eye was easier.

 

Darcy was sitting up in bed, brushing her hair out of her face with a clumsy hand. She had little presses of red on her own chest. From kissing him, having him kiss her. The sheet fell as she sat up and there was a faint trace of color by her nipple. He had an immediate regret, that he didn’t know the exact shade of pink that nipple had once been. He wondered what the world had lost with that color. He thought it might be the flavor of something so sweet that it made you ache with the understanding that the taste would fade, couldn’t be preserved indefinitely. 

 

“Did it work?” she asked, blinking and fumbling at the side table for her glasses. He’d taken them off her, chasing after her mouth as she’d teased him with her small hands, made him buck and squirm below her. The feeling was bubbling again, he could feel his cock stirring at the picture in his head, the picture of her on the bed, a gray bruise on her neck from his bite.

 

“Yeah,” he said. He walked back to the bed and pressed his face into her hair. She smelled like him and he wanted to press her down into the sheets. “What color do you want?”

 

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. 

 

He wanted to paint her lips red again, wanted to try to color a blush on her cheeks, down her neck, across her chest. He wanted to see if he could find the right shade of pale to cover her skin. He remembered that her eyes were blue too, more gray than his and he thought it might be the color that took gentle, dry wit away from the world. The dark chocolate sheen of her hair would be that warm burn of a bonfire on one side, the cold night air on the other.

 

He wished he’d seen her in color, just like this, bed mussed and quiet with sleep, naked and uncaring. 

 

He wanted to find the colors again, see Darcy against a backdrop of the city smeared with its gray stains and neon lights and yellow taxi cabs, her eyes squinting up at him with dubious amusement. 

 

He picked a pale blue and light gray and Darcy lifted her chin up for him, opened her eyes wide with a uncharacteristic cooperation. She winced as he blended the colors into her eyes, as gently as he could, and her nose wrinkled as she blinked up at him.

 

“That was a responsible choice,” she said, smile curling up to one side. “I thought you’d re-apply the lipstick and leave us in bed all day.”

 

“I thought about it,” he said, grinning. “I think I got the color right.”

 

“Feels close,” she said, blinking again. “I want coffee.”

 

“Then I definitely got it right,” he said, standing up out of bed.

 

She stared at him for a long moment, eyes wide.

 

“You want your glasses? Get a better view?” he teased.

 

“I do, yeah,” she said, sharp, flat and so perfectly Darcy that Johnny felt his stomach flip happily. She smiled again, small and pleased and then rolled her eyes. “Put pants on. Get over yourself.”

 

He did, turning away and grinning to himself at the small squeak of sound as he bent over to pull his pants up off the floor. 

 

“I’ll make the coffee,” he offered, hopping into the legs and pulling them up his hips. 

 

She’d already stolen his shirt off the floor by the time he turned back around and he stopped at the bed to steal a kiss before heading into the kitchen. 

 

“How pale do you like it?”

 

“Medium.” 

 

Johnny frowned as he filled up the pot and set it going. Medium would leave a lot of room for error on his part. He took down two coffee cups from the shelf and turned to watch out the window while he waited for the pot to fill, for Darcy to make it out of bed. 

 

There was a spark of color outside the window, one of the trees planted on the balcony two stories down. The rust-red and orange leaf—the feeling of fighting a losing battle, the burn of effort in your tired body and worn out thoughts—that Darcy had smeared with crayons was still flapping brightly outside the window. This time with a friend.

 

“You colored another leaf?” he asked as she stumbled out of her bedroom.

 

“Huh?” She stopped at his side, squinting up at him through her glasses and he spun in her to stared out the window.

 

The second leaf had more yellow, not as far turned, a cheerful squashy color—wary excitement. 

 

“I didn’t color that,” she said.

 

The coffee pot chirped behind them.

  
  


  1. Pearl White and Things Coming to a Good End



 

“I hear you saved the day.”

 

Jane arrived home again, a month or so later, on the same day that Darcy’s fuzzy pink sweater came out of the wash, perfectly soft and sweetly colored again.

 

“Funny,” Darcy said, pulling Jane’s bags out the woman’s hands and setting them on the floor so she could get in a good hug. “I heard the same about you.”

 

Thor had been right, and Jane had been her usual, perfect and ruthless self. They had found the source of trouble in the universe. (“Electromagnetic conductive pollution with a healthy dose of-” “Yes, magic.”)

 

“But I never would’ve been where I needed to be if you’d hadn’t figured out the emotions as quickly as you did,” Jane said, squeezing Darcy tight. “You do understand that there’s a whole aspect of our human make-up we’ve only just discovered.  _ You’ve  _ discovered. There’s an entirely new field of science available for research and-”

 

Johnny chose that moment to walk into the kitchen, still wet from the shower with a towel wrapped around his hips. Jane stopped her speech and blinked. 

 

“Hey Jane,” Johnny said, grinning, blue eyes sharp and gleeful.

 

Darcy gave him a narrow eyed look, not at all fooled by his casual stroll—strut—over to the coffee pot. 

 

“Hi Johnny,” Jane said, wide gaze fixed to Darcy’s face. “Darce, maybe we’ll catch up later.”

 

“Later is good,” Darcy said, nodding and watching Johnny carry two mugs of coffee back to her bedroom. 

 

She followed him in as Jane dragged her luggage away.

 

“Romantic daydreams are back?” Johnny asked, gazing at Darcy in her sweater. He was on her bed, the towel barely hanging onto his hips and Darcy thought it was probably a wasted effort to have gotten dressed that morning. 

 

“Looks like it,” Darcy said, peeling the sweater back up over her head and dropping it into an open drawer of her dresser.

 

“Got any particular ones in mind?” he asked, setting his coffee on her bedside table and reaching out for her.

 

She curled up against him on the bed, let her fingers walk over the obnoxiously tight planes of his chest. “Did I ever tell you about the cabin my family goes to in the summers?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed <3
> 
> leave me some sugar!

**Author's Note:**

> leave a little sugar if you can spare it!


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